ABSTRACT
Evaluation can be defined as the expression, overt or covert, implicit or explicit, verbal or nonverbal, of the speaker's stance. Affective evaluation need not reflect real 'spontaneous' affect or emotion. A third major area in which evaluation is key is modality. Modality "construes the region of uncertainty that lies between 'yes' and 'no'". Empathetic deixis indeed provides the link between deixis and evaluation. The extreme pervasiveness of evaluation has led some observers to argue "that speakers in conversation express a kind of linguistically covert stance with every utterance, even when the speaker does not directly articulate a stance". Evaluative prosody is a phraseological phenomenon at the semantics-pragmatics interface leaning toward "the pragmatic side of the pragmatics/semantics continuum". It represents a sub-type of 'semantic preference' an idiomatic patterning which concerns "the relation, not between individual words, but between a lemma or word-form and a set of semantically related word forms".
